Character History and Personality: Wren was born on the hottest day of summer in a suburb of New Orleans that hadn’t seen a scandal in years. It was a place that had dark secrets and warm smells, where cemeteries dotted the landscape, and where you couldn’t hear the sounds of the city from your window. She was born in a house past the graves, in a bed that smelled of musk and sex and cheap perfume, to a woman who was too young to be having a baby and too old to care.

Her mother (Lauren 'Lark' Maheu) was 14, and she already had a well-earned reputation for bad morals and bad business. She was the acknowledged mistress of the town sheriff, but everyone turned a blind eye and pretended the girl that had been walking around town with a big belly for the past 9 months didn’t exist. It was said, rightly so, that the girl had walked into the town diner one night and whispered in the sheriff’s ear, a warning, blood and broken water running down her thighs.

Wren’s father had died as soon as she was born, his wife and daughters burnt to a crisp alongside him in their lovely two-story colonial. There were whispers of foul play, but no one could wipe out an entire family, surely. And things went quiet, and things went still, and Wren’s mother moved them to Florida when Wren was three. The streets were lined with tourists, and those tourists lined up for her mother’s bed in 629 Duval Street. Wren watched, and Wren listened, and Wren learned.

She learned to love lights that twinkled, and she learned to love fairy tales, and she learned to take men into her bed and make them love her. She learned all of these things, but she learned other things too. Pity for her mother, who shouldn’t be whoring herself to the tourists, who shouldn’t be living in a house with the paint crackling like so much tissue. Pity for the other women who walked the same lines as she did, who worked the same streets, who weren’t as young and a pretty as her mother was - the ones who couldn’t afford their homes with the crackling white paint; the ones who ended up dead in pools of piss and semen.

Wren went to school with the local children, and she ignored their taunts and their teasing. She was witty, and she was quick, and she was amazingly adept at wrapping men around her fingers - teachers, students, police, tourists.

She started working when she was 13. The same teachers, students, police and tourists that had danced her around when she was younger fell into her bed now she was older. It was the year her mother crawled home to die on their couch, panties around her ankles, the year they lost the house, the year things ended and things began.

She became the sheriff’s mistress. He kept her, and he fed her, and she came cheap that first time. The next time, she charged more, and so on and so on. She learned to read in French, and she took etiquette classes, but she never returned to school and conventional education. The tourists that came through the Keys came on yachts and in Mercedes, and she was young and lovely, and she let them take advantage, to own her body for a time. It was taboo for them - men, on vacation, taking pleasure in pretty, underage things. She learned.

It didn’t become a real nightmare until she was 15. He’d been cruel, and she’d panicked, been scared. She’d clutched onto that man in that pickup truck, her fingers tight on his shoulders as he ripped inside her. She’d screamed, and he’d taken his pleasure, and then he’d beaten her near to death. None of it surprised her - her mother had come home bruised and battered often enough.

When she was 16, she learned how life on the street could be for others - for the girls and the women turned old in alleys and on truckbeds. She took in girl after girl that year, took them in to the house the man who kept her had rented for her. She nursed them back to health, let them sleep on her pure cotton sheets, and she hunted down the men who had hurt them. She seduced them, she let them think she was whatever they were looking for, and then she took them for every last cent. Sometimes she stopped at money, sometimes she ruined their lives. In those early days, she didn’t hurt anyone. But that was in the early days.

At 17, she spent a year with a boy who had a love for knives, and she learned to wield the knife, to make blade sing through the air, to leave a mark he wouldn’t forget.

At 18 she moved to Seattle and everything changed. Vigilantism was rife there, and she found a place where she fit in. She went out in the evenings, and she marked the men who harmed girls, leaving a small bloodied bird carved in their skin as a calling card, a warning to other girls. She met a boy there, and she loved him, and he loved her. But it was a dark time, a bad time, and everything unraveled when she learned she was pregnant.

She had spent her entire life running, and she ran then too. The timing, just after a job that had ended in violent sex, meant she had no idea who the baby’s father was. She tried, for days, to tell the boy she loved, to let him know, to let him in, but he’d withdrawn so much by that point that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. They’d talked so many times about futures, about not being ready, but she couldn’t bring herself to have an abortion, not if it might be his.

And so, she ran.

One night, six months later, and Wren was working on the streets again in Florida - feverish, ill, pregnant, underweight and scared. 19, and wishing she had done things differently. The man that picked her up that night was a tourist, and he took her to a hotel and didn’t sleep with her. His name was Steven Johnson, and he made her a proposal instead. He’d take her home to Reno, where he had a gorgeous house and a beautiful wife, and they’d let her stay until she had the baby. And then, then they’d adopt and raise the child as their own, somewhere she could visit, somewhere she could see. In a black market world, one where newborns were sold for thousands, she didn’t make a cent, not knowing any better. But she stayed, and she didn’t hold the baby even once after giving birth, not being given the chance when the tables were turned on her at the last moment. They put her out on the street, with only a bag, and they turned her away - no rights, no birth certificate, nothing.

The family was, in fact, not as nice as she'd originally thought, but they thought they were "saving" the baby, and maybe that made them better than her. They weren’t wealthy, and they weren’t famous. The woman, Amy, was a housewife. The husband, Steven, worked in real estate and liked to look at her too long at a spell while he told her she was a sinner. They were Christians, a little overbearing when it came to religion, but normal and quiet and (she convinced herself) good. She knew she could never offer a child the life they could, but she was too selfish to disappear entirely. Instead, they disappeared. Gone without a trace a week after the birth. She took a job at a local brothel, and she searched.

It took almost two years to find them in Vegas, and by then she had blackmailed a man she had marked, falling back to her old ways and her knives. She’d found him with an underage working girl and, in exchange for a hundred thousand dollars and his assurance of good behavior, she’d promised not to tell anyone about his crimes. She took the money, and she rented a room in the Caesar's Palace, and she began drumming up business of a different sort.

Almost five years after she left New York, and she had a permanent suite in the hotel she’d first called home in Las Vegas. Her business cards said she was an expert with a cat o’ nine-tails, and she called herself Minette. She dressed conservatively, wore glasses, and looked like she spent her Sunday's in church. It was as much a costume as the one she'd worn as a vigilante, and her clients were among Las Vegas’ wealthiest tourists; she didn’t sleep with any of them. She grew cold and hard, and she hid her softness so far out of sight that no one even believed it existed anymore. She survived, and she only let her mask slip behind closed doors.

She went to the park every afternoon, where she sat on a bench near the playground and watched the local children play. It was like clockwork, her appearance there, and no one questioned it anymore, the well-dressed woman visiting a playground. It was there, on that bench, that it happened. It wasn’t a voice, and it wasn’t an awareness of another personality. It was a compulsion to steal something, which was ridiculous. She didn’t need to steal anything at all. She’d given up helping anyone years before, too numb for masks or knives or little girls who couldn’t help themselves.

The journal arrived that very day. She’d heard about Passages, about the hotel of legend, and she hired someone to look into it for her.

Alter: Selina likes the broken girl whose mind she inhabits. Oh, the girl puts on a good act, but Selina knows better. Selina knows acts. At almost 23, Selina's entire life is an act. An act so good, that even she believes it. But she doesn't like the girl's lack of motivation, lack of fun, lack of danger. For Selina, danger is an addiction, something she can't resist, something she doesn't want to resist. The little girl lives in a world of plenty, but she doesn't do anything with it, and that has to change. Selina isn't too worried, though. She understands this girl, this mind. It's a good match, and not so different from herself. Similar pasts, similar hurts - different ways of coping, but that's alright. She's young, the girl, and there's time.

Selina doesn't need anyone's approval; she gave up on that a long time ago. She takes what she wants, and she does what she wants, and unlike this girl she inhabits, she means it. She's nobody's hero, and she doesn't sacrifice her own pleasure for anyone. She gave up on being what the world expected of her ages ago, and there's no turning back. She doesn't want to be tied down, doesn't want to depend on a man for her value, and she doesn't want to be fucked over. The little girl pretends, but Selina is the embodiment of I don't give a fuck - most of the time. She doesn't sleep. She has nightmares. She's in trouble, and she's in deep. The silly girl's head, that's a safe place where her demons can't find her.

As for Batman - he'll come. He always comes, eventually. She doesn't know his true identity, but she knows him, and he knows her. They've only seen each other a few times, but they've been memorable encounters. All sex, no talking, and he always hates himself for it in the morning. Oh, he tries not to do it, but he can't help himself; Selina likes that. As for Bruce Wayne, she might have used one of his little parties as a battle ground for the Russian mob, but the man has money - he can recover. She doesn't like him, really, Bruce. He's boring, if you scratch beneath the surface of his wealth. Nothing like Batman. Her current consternation is those Russians. They killed her best friend, and now she's in a little bit of trouble with the law - go figure.

Selina's own past leaves much to be desired. A former prostitute with an abusive pimp for a boyfriend, she understands the broken girl's past better than she'd like to admit. But she doesn't talk about those things, and she doesn't think about them. They're her past, not her present. Her present is the death of Lola, the dirty cops on her tail and the fact that Batman got her sprung from prison while taking all of her money in the bargain. He only wants to help, but she's way beyond helping. She's on the run, and she's going to have to trust someone, no matter how much she doesn't want to.

Journal: Selina's journal is a sleek, black Wayne Tech prototype, similar to the Experia Arc. She saves things on it, takes pictures, makes notes, makes lists, adds contacts and ciphers secrets. She doesn't write long passages, not wanting to read her own thoughts after the fact. She is never introspective.

Storylines;

Batman:onerule - Bruce Wayne/Batman. Enough said. In DCnU, where this version of Selina is coming from, she knows the Bat (intimately), but she doesn't know he's Bruce Wayne.

Gwen:hitjackpot - In canon, someone near Selina's age who Selina wants to keep safe, but who she needs. Here, I'm looking for someone Wren is worried about, could be a friend or someone she doesn't know very well. Someone to guard her secrets and help her get by.